Among the news of the truly frightening, augmented reality takes to the skies, literally, with Pinkfoot Limited's Plane Finder AR iPhone app that can identify planes flying above.
Simply pointing your iPhone at the sky and scanning around, you can locate specific airplanes. Plane Finder AR does not just identify where planes are, it also gives the full itinerary of a flight, including the flight number, aircraft registration, flight vectors of speed and altitude, and how far away it is.
It works by picking up the ADS-B (automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast) plane feeds used by all commercial air liners to transmit their name, position, destination, and more. With the live data from the planes and flight control it aligns markers based on the iPhone's own GPS and camera orientation. It's a marvel of augmented reality that's really cool...and really frightening at the same time. Why someone would need such an app is up for discussion, leaving us with the question: is "because you can" enough of a reason to create such an app?
